Millstone, A Spinning Wheel?

The Tribune series ``The American Millstone`` would have benefited from being renamed ``The American Challenge.`` Americans love a challenge. They run from millstones, losers and pathology cases.

A case of both the best and worst in journalism, your series illuminated a future crisis-in-the-making while undermining possible solutions. Not once did you even bother to mention that this ``underclass`` (a term out of Nazi Germany) invented two of this society`s most popular recent cultural phenomena, rap music and break dancing. Nor was there any mention of the graffito art which really is art, as opposed to that which is merely graffiti. In short, the idea never comes through that there is real human potential out there being disregarded. Also, there`s no marriage of patriotism and concern here. This ``underclass`` term conveys the notion we`re talking about people who are not Americans, ``born in the U.S.A.,`` but rather members of a subhuman species.

Somewhere in the editorials you should have asked your readers what they think Bruce Springsteen`s song really means. Do they think the topsoil wrote the Declaration of Independence or don`t they know Thomas Jefferson did? Do they really think the flag named this place or don`t they know a Dutch mapmaker did?

Patriotism is not simply kissing the ground or waving the flag because the ground and the flag didn`t create the country; the people did.

We must rally to the defense of the poor because we are Americans, or we are of no value to each other and our nation.

Also, your Millstone series did not stress that the middle and upper classes will have to make attitudinal changes as great as those of the poor, though of a different nature.

We accept the principle that individuals have to be allowed to succeed by different means. We allow wheelchair-bound participants to start marathons 15 minutes ahead of the regular runners and do not begrudge kidney patients their ``dependence`` on dialysis machines.

We must decide to do the same for the poor. A lot of possible solutions are not being tried because the middle and upper classes want all solutions to fit their cultural and political preferences.

Welfare is the perfect example. All of its stupid rules--from forcing the father to leave home so the family can be eligible to deducting part-time wages from the welfare check--have stayed in the system to accommodate the middle-class view that it`s immoral to want or need assistance from anyone.

So, the compromise is to give the poor the absolute minimum assistance possible, comparable to giving a man sinking in quicksand just enough to keep his head afloat while steadfastly refusing anything that will actually get him out of the quicksand for fear of making him ``dependent.``

Unless the poor can actually get out of the quicksand, they cannot and will not advance. The middle class must change its mind about what constitutes ``minimal assistance.``

The middle class must be willing to tolerate solutions that don`t necessarily jibe with the free market and that middle-class people wouldn`t necessarily adopt for themselves. But the middle class must join the poor in changing attitudes; otherwise society will go on spinning its wheels pointlessly.